Can you promise?
by PaigexPurgatory
Summary: Can you promise that this is real? After all this time, can you make me that promise Arthur? Warnings for drug use, sadness will ensue. One-shot


**Hello my lovelies! This is my first ever Merlin story. Recently became obsessed and watched every episode in less than a month. I hope you like it, or rather hate it in a good kind of way because it is indeed a sad one shot, sorry. I have no idea why I wrote such a downer of a story but, whatever, I am over it. I really hope you don't hate me after this. **

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The problem with falling is that once you start it is nearly impossible to stop. It is unlike falling in love or tripping and hitting the ground. This is a more proverbial fall, the fall from faith and stability to nothingness. It is that kind of fall that ruins a person. Because it consumes you, skin and bone, mind and spirit. It is your peace in pieces, shattered and too tired to get up. Merlin is falling, falling because he has nothing below him, nothing to persuade him to stay.

He is so very alone, everyone who meant anything was long ago dead, but even if they were alive they would not go looking for him, not after all this time. Merlin had left after Arthur's death. Run away. People had looked for him, Gwen , and Gwaine mostly.

But it has been hundreds of years, the year 2013, and still Merlin is all alone, no friends nor people to care about. He had not aged since Arthur had died that day, at least not physically. He had seen wars, fought wars, felt blood between his fingers and a gun in hands. Yet nothing could combat the loneliness, the pain of dying and being reborn in the same skin moments later.

He never dies, and god he has tried a million times, starvation, shot, run through with a sword, everything. Merlin is not looking for death, he doesn't strive for it, never really has, he only wants peace. He even tried praying for it, but it had been a long time since god had cared for him. For the man that defied all natural law, all scientific reasoning. Merlin has no idea why or how his heart keeps beating, but it must be some kind of punishment, some kind of consequence for losing Arthur in the first place.

He is stuck, so now he will do anything, anything for that awful barrenness to go away. So Merlin turns first to magic. Magic to take him away to envelope him in gold sparks and fake dreams. But that doesn't last forever. The placebo effect fades after a few years and then what? Everything he had tricked himself into believing was real was gone again.

Everything hurt, even his bones, a psychosomatic reaction to him believing it was all entirely his fault. So when magic failed to cover up his pain, he turned to drinking, such a human thing. Human is not something he identifies with anymore. He drinks in the morning, afternoon and most of the night until he passes out. Then he gets up and does the same thing. Soon he is the town drunk, kids were warned to stay away and people kept a ten foot buffer between themselves and him. He has no money or job other than to watch for Arthur. So he sleeps in allies and spends the money he can get on vodka and whiskey. The drinking lasts for a while. But it was unlike him, it was not forever.

So in 2007 he turns to drugs. It starts with little things like weed, then turns to pain pills, lots of them, enough to kill any regular man. But not Merlin, no Merlin is indestructible, at least in regards to his physical form. If we talk of his mind then we talk of the dead, not by magic or drugs of any kind, it is because Merlin is here and Arthur is not and he needs him to be. So tonight he decides to take one, or two, or a handful too many pills. Now Merlin is not trying to commit suicide, not at all, he is trying to not to feel. So he takes the pills and settles in.

He ponders his extended life, he thinks of Arthur, of their brotherhood and how he had let him down as Arthur had never done to him and how it cost the ultimate price. These years of solitude, it is his penance, and he knows it. If he did not know, then it would not be penance he thinks.

The drugs begin to kick in, and his vision blurs. Gaunt, sunken eyes are unfocused and his head to heavy to hold up any longer. Merlin's head lulls backward and hits the wood floor of the abandoned motel he lives in. There is a figure in the doorway, he could not make out a face, not until it was lingering above him and speaking to him in words he was too high to understand. The hallucination seemed so real, so concrete, Arthur there, his face hovering above him. That moment, the last second before passing out, he feels peace.

When Merlin wakes up he is in the hospital, again. This is not the first time some stranger brought him in, playing the hero. He is tired of waking up and everything being real. Something is resting over his hand, carefully avoiding the numerous IV's in his arm. "Merlin?" someone whispers and the sound makes Merlin cringe. "Merlin, I'm sorry" he does not want to open his eyes and see that the person there is not Arthur. "all the pain I have caused you, all the days you have suffered, I am sorry." The voice hitches, "forgive me, please? Because I know this is my fault, I know that, you are doing this to yourself because of me, and I am sorry, I am so very sorry. So stop being an idiot and wake up, do it, for me, I can't- won't do it without you."

Merlin shudders as a droplet falls on his hand, it is a tear. Arthur never cried, 'no man is worth your tears' he had said, but how wrong he had been. "If I open my eyes, will it be you? Will it be you Arthur? Can you promise?"

"Yes"

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**I apologize if you hate me. But maybe it is terrible and you hate it because it is a terribly written piece of crap. Either way review and let me know :) **


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